The Room
by daphnap
Summary: Dawn's efforts at trying to discover who she is.


Title: The Chair

Spoilers: Fifth season

Summary: Dawn's efforts at self-affirmation.

Author's Notes: I like Dawn, I don't know why, but she just strikes me as a real teenager, selfish and self absorbed, and trying to discover who she is. 

            Weird, huh?

Disclaimer: Not mine, none of it, not making money, so don't sue. Belongs to FOX and the god that is Joss. 

**

I go to the hospital after school. I'll call Xander and tell him I'm going over to Karen's to study, and then I'll walk the three miles from school to the hospital. I'll avoid the cars, since the sidewalk ends about a mile in, I'll put my life at risk to get to the hospital.

Then I sneak in through the front doors. Great thing about Sunnydale is that there are so many people injured or dying they barely notice the young girl wandering in the halls. I'm a distraught daughter looking for her mother after a car accident; a worried girlfriend looking for her beau who's in for mono; a terrified young girl scared that she is pregnant. 

Anything to get through the doors, anything to get to the room.

And it always works. No matter how many excuses, farfetched as they are, they never remember me from last time, they let me wander the halls, the scared lost little girl. So lost that she finds herself in the same room every time.

The room. 

Padded walls and leather straps.

Kinky in a comforting sort of way.

And then I find my chair, the plastic chair with the uncomfortable seat. I pull it up to one of the beds, a different one each time. I sit there, with my fingers thread through some poor guys hand; who is so incoherent and detached that he can _see_ me.

He can't see me grasp his hand stare blankly into his manic eyes.

He can see the empty space in the chair, where a human should be.

His hands grip mine and shudder.

Not real.

You do not exist.

His senses and his mind tell him two different perspectives. His fingers tell him that a young girl of 15 is holding his hand and stroking his fingertips. His eyes tell him that I'm sitting in the chair. His mind tells him that this is impossible.

When he begins to scream I let go and hide myself in a closet until the nurses sedate him and he stops his incessant cries that an alien was just there and held his hands _and didn't say a word but I promise you it's all true, all of it, it's true. _

And the nurses leave, and he looks at me from under sedated eyelids and his gives me a manic grin.

I'm his proof, that he is not crazy.

I exist for him because I don't.

So I make my way out of the hospital, my weekly solace taken and done for. I walk the five miles home on open road and broken sidewalk and I let my mind go blank.

Xander will ask how the study session went, Tara will make pancakes, Spike might wander in during the night look for a drink, and I would go to bed.

It would be another week before _another_ big test requires me to study at Karen's.

I'll put up my hair this time, slip on a hat and try to make myself look different from the last time.

It never fools the crazies. They always see the empty chair as my nonexistent-_can't-really-be-there_-hand clasps their own. I won't say anything but they'll hear the slow thrum of my absence.

They see me for what I'm not.

And then I'll walk those five miles back home, my feet barely noticing the cracking cement.

I'll get home, eat dinner, laugh with Xander, and give the requisite kiss goodnight to big sis and curl up under my covers, too tired to cry, wanting to get back to that hospital chair.

So I wait for next week, counting down the days, counting down the ways to make myself look different, to get back into that chair be seen for what I am.

Next week I will walk those three miles and avoid getting hit by cars.

I'll sit in the chair and hold the hand of another crazy.

I'll sit there for as long as possible, as they get more agitated; as their senses scream at them that I can't exist-belong-be _real_.

But his hand is real and he'll be screaming obscenities and claims that I'm just a ball-of-light-that thinks-she's-a-_person_.

I think therefore I am.

Sure.

Fine.

Whatever.

**


End file.
